Abstract: What does the 1970s look like through the lens of women's history' The articles in this issue explore key markers of this decade—the expansion of the rights revolution that began in the 1960s, a loosening of previous restrictions on contraception and abortion, the broadening of women's healthcare and family planning organizations, and the growth of the environmentalist movement—to show how these developments touched the lives of women in Egypt, Australia, the United States, and Spain. Whether centered on national and regional studies or such global moments in 1970s women's history as the 1975 International Women's Year Conference in Mexico City, the articles highlight women's empowerment through bodily sovereignty ... Read More PubDate: 2018-06-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The Franco dictatorship forbade contraception in Spain. Specific regulations date from January 1941 when a law on "the protection of natality, against abortion and contraceptive propaganda" was passed. The Spanish penal code considered contraception, abortion, and infanticide as offences of similar gravity and placed them all under the category of crimes against the person. Only in 1978, three years after the dictator's death and during the transition to democracy, was the prohibition on the sale and advertisement of contraception lifted.1Franco's legislation on contraception and abortion was a product of the regime's National Catholic ideology. Its objective was, on the one hand, to enhance natality in a country ... Read More PubDate: 2018-06-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In 1955, a Floridian named Patricia Carter made plans for the birth of her eighth child in her home. Carter's usual experience consisted of downing a few whiskey highballs, resuming her housework, delivering the child, cutting the cord, washing the new baby, and then presenting it to the family. She had every intention of repeating her time-tested routine. Carter said that she "enjoyed the rapture of childbirth as nature intended it." Sixteen years later, Carolyn Brown labored in the breech birth of her daughter in her home in California, under the care of a Pasadena physician, her husband, and a neighbor who was nursing her own three-month-old baby. After her husband announced that they would name their new ... Read More PubDate: 2018-06-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The emergence of the women's movement in Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s opened up new opportunities for the creation of lesbian communities. While these were predominantly urban, the 1970s also saw the creation of rural women's lands. As part of a transnational phenomenon in this period, women built these rural communities as an expression of their feminist commitments to separatism, collectivity, and the forging of a lesbian culture—values that defined similar communities in the United States and across Europe. Despite their common ideological origins, rural lesbian-separatist communities were also shaped in significant ways by their local contexts. This article explores the ways in which regional ... Read More PubDate: 2018-06-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The closing session of the 1985 International Women's Year (IWY) conference held in Nairobi, Kenya, was frustrating for Bella Abzug, an American feminist and former member of the House of Representatives for New York State. The United Nations (UN)-sponsored conference to assess the fruits of the UN Decade of Women (1976–1985) became a site of struggles between the First, Second, and Third Worlds. Preferring to end the conference on a note of harmony, the session organizers asked representatives from each country to emphasize the conference's shared experience and avoid bringing up divisive issues. In the middle of the closing moments, however, a woman from Egypt raised the Arab-Israeli question, a topic that had ... Read More PubDate: 2018-06-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Inspired by the stories of poor women, mothers, and abandoned children in such works as Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, a novel to which she returned many times, Rachel Fuchs gravitated towards the study of those who many scholars marginalized or entirely left out of the historical narrative, those at the bottom of the social ladder—the poor, the abandoned, and, particularly, working-class women. In her many books and articles, she uncovered the lives of impoverished women, carefully mined archives and the observations of government officials, and examined the French state's response to those in need. Her work on the welfare state and social policy made several important contributions to a field where historical work ... Read More PubDate: 2018-06-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's beautifully written "well-behaved women seldom make history" has become a feminist axiom (despite Ulrich proving that those boring, virtuous women could make history, too).1 Historians have long been interested in "disorderly" women—tomboys, delinquents, activists, and heretics. Many historians have thus read misbehavior as resistance and as a form of feminist praxis—women and girls act out to protest gender norms or heteropatriarchy. To what extent are "bad girls" feminist heroes' And what happens when historians look closely at the trajectory of bad girls' individual lives' Rather than simply framing misbehaving girls and women as heroes of their own lives and times, historians need to ... Read More PubDate: 2018-06-13T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: "Forward, my sisters, forward, and whoever shakes the cradle with her right hand, rocks the world with her left," said Augustine Tleel to the 1925 graduating class at the Greek Orthodox Girls' School in Jerusalem. As Ela Greenberg shows in Preparing the Mothers of Tomorrow, this speech expressed a growing acceptance of education, activism, and leadership for women of all faiths in early twentieth-century Palestine (167). Whether in governmental, Christian missionary, or private Islamic schools, education empowered Palestinian women as teachers and actors in the public sphere, including radio and print media. Yet, despite this consensus, British Mandate officials denied many young Muslim women such opportunities ... Read More PubDate: 2018-06-13T00:00:00-05:00
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